1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to data and voice communications in a wireless environment, and in particular, to providing a wireless replacement terminal for data and voice applications provided by a service provider for home and small business wired communications.
2. Description of the Related Art
The use of fast Internet connections has grown rapidly over the recent few years. As more people buy home and office computers and create home or office networks, the demand for versatile broadband high-speed connections steadily increases.
When a user requires voice and data applications, such as by connecting to the Internet, they might connect through a dial-up modem, a local-area-network (LAN) connection in their office, through a cable modem, or through a digital subscriber line (DSL) connection, as shown in FIG. 4. A DSL connection (and several variations on DSL technology, e.g., ADSL, HDSL, ISDL, MSDSL, RADSL, SDSL, VDSL, VoDSL and the like) has numerous advantages over the above-mentioned methods.
For example, using a DSL connection, an Internet connection may be left open while a phone line is simultaneously used for voice calls. DSL is a very high-speed connection that uses the same wires as a regular telephone line, so little additional hardware is required. However, the main disadvantage to DSL is that the service is not available everywhere and it is limited by a wire-line connection, as shown in FIG. 6.
There have been attempts to solve this problem. However, no complete solution is available that offers static and dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP) over wireless facilities to a customer's location that could directly (or indirectly via 802.11, Bluetooth, or the like) connect to service providers using wireless facilities. Other attempts to solve this problem have been attempted but require point-to-point connectivity and do not permit connectivity to the public switch telephone network (PSTN). These conventional solutions are limited by range, topography and do not facilitate the use of dial tones.
Consequently, there is a need to provide broadband service to remote areas where a regular telephone line may not be available. A new housing development and/or a home not wired for broadband facilities may benefit from a wireless terminal which includes both data and voice applications capabilities.